Chapter 8: Ink

"My uncle thinks I am cold," Jin-woo said.

It was Saturday night, and he sat on the stool at her drafting table with no shirt on and his back toward her.

She stood behind him with a wide soft brush in one hand and a jar of deep blue ink in the other.

"Are you?" she said.

"Not here."

"Good. Hold still."

"I do not know how to hold still on a stool."

"Then learn."

She touched the brush to his left shoulder blade.

The ink was cold, and the muscle under it jumped.

"Sorry," she said.

"Do not apologize. Do it again."

She laid a long curved stroke across the pale skin.

It was her favorite blue, the one she used for Blue Hour's sky in the minute before the lights came on.

She drew a crescent, slowly, and filled it in with three careful passes of the brush.

His breathing slowed under her hands.

"What is it?" he said.

"A moon."

"Why?"

"Because it's the blue hour, and you're my blue hour. I'm not explaining it any better than that."

He was silent for a moment, and she saw the skin at the back of his neck flush dark.

"Put another one," he said.

She added stars, small dots and dashes, down the length of his spine.

Each cold touch made a shiver run along his back, and she felt every one of them in her own stomach.

"You are quiet," she said.

"I like it when you paint."

"You like being a canvas."

"I like being yours."

She put the brush down on the edge of the table.

Then she bent and kissed the center of the moon, and her lips came away blue.

"Don't move," she said against his skin.

"I am not moving."

"You moved."

"I did not."

"If you move again, I start over."

"Then I will not move," he said, in a voice she barely recognized.

She kissed down his spine, and she took her time.

She kissed each star she had painted, and each time he shuddered, she felt it under her mouth.

His hands gripped the edge of the stool until the knuckles showed white.

She reached around him and slid her hands over his chest, over the warm hard planes of it.

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